


Deer in the Headlights

by scioscribe



Category: Baby Driver (2017)
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-04
Updated: 2017-07-04
Packaged: 2018-11-23 10:49:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,041
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11400987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: They weren’t using him, Baby thought.  They couldn’t use him if he didn’t mind being used.





	Deer in the Headlights

The first time Baby drove for them, Buddy had blond highlights in his hair—“Don’t ask,” he said, slumping down a little lower in his chair, covering his smirk with the rim of his coffee cup—and Darling was thinking about getting a tattoo. She showed Baby some pictures.

“He’s only gonna tell you to get sheet music all across your back,” Buddy said. “Which isn’t a half-bad idea.”

Baby traced the wings of a dark blue blackbird inked on too-pale skin. He raised his eyebrows.

“Yeah, I know,” Darling said. She popped her gum. “They like to give you these sample photos with girls with skin like fucking paper.”

“She won’t do it anyway,” Buddy said to Baby, like he was confiding something. “She doesn’t like to make decisions.”

“I married you, didn’t I?”

Buddy held up two fingers. “Twice. No, shit. Three times.” He shrugged. “We keep getting new names. Plus it’s an excuse to go to Vegas.”

“Like we ever need an excuse,” Darling said. She slid her phone back across the table, taking the blackbird with her. “This one I like.” And she seemed to be talking to Buddy, but she had already tucked her phone back in her pocket, the screen gone dark, so they were no longer talking tattoos.

After they left, Doc said, “Are they bothering you?” His voice was neutral.

“No,” Baby said.

*

Sometimes they would all spend the night at Doc’s warehouse, sleeping on shitty camping beds. Baby would lie on his back, no sleep timer on his iPod, and count down the hours till dawn in three-minute tracks until he either fell asleep or the patch of gray on the floor turned pink with sunup. But even with his earbuds in, it was impossible to miss Buddy and Darling fucking over on the other side of the room. Darling was riding him, her long hair in her face, sweat shining between her breasts. Buddy’s hands tight on her thighs.

Darling turned her head towards him and Baby looked back at the ceiling, squeezing his eyes shut, but he heard her laugh cut through “Killer Queen.”

_Guaranteed to blow your mind anytime._

“You want to join us, Baby?”

He lay still.

But then there was the low underlying whisper of bare feet against the cool cement floor and in another second, Darling’s hand was on his chest, stroking him through the thin cotton of his T-shirt. Up close, it was impossible not to open his eyes and look at her, her full lips slightly tensed in a kind of restrained mockery.

“Maybe he’s not interested,” Buddy said.

“Oh, he’s interested,” Darling said.

“Maybe he doesn’t like men.”

“Buddy’s nonnegotiable,” Darling said. “So if you want me, you take him, too. See, Baby, I believe in fidelity, and I believe in nobody looking at me unless I want them to, but you’re allowed. Allowed to look and allowed to touch, me and Buddy both. Consider yourself the destination in a couples retreat.”

Baby said, “Like Sandals.”

Buddy propped himself up on one elbow. “No shit, I think that’s the first thing I’ve heard you say.”

He looked like marble, like a statue. The two of them together were like an album cover—nothing abstract, just a photograph of pure desirability, ambiguous but intense. David Bowie. He had a separate iPod for Bowie.

“You can leave the earbuds in,” Darling said.

The camp beds weren’t big enough for three, were barely even big enough for two, but they made it work: Baby sitting with his knees apart and Buddy down on the floor between them, sucking his cock, his hands reached up for Baby’s hip and Darling’s, too, as Darling rubbed herself against Baby’s side, slick wet heat smearing against his skin. He spun his thumb across the dial and turned up the volume until his ears ached. He couldn’t hear the sound he made when he came.

But he could read Buddy’s lips afterwards as Buddy stood up, wiping his hand across his mouth: “Attaboy, Baby. Now make yourself useful while I make my wife a very happy woman.”

Baby eased up off the bed and let Darling lie down, let Buddy lift up one of her legs and sink into her.

Useful. He lowered his head and encircled one of Darling’s nipples with his mouth, flicked his tongue there. She tasted good, like saltwater and silk.

Buddy pushed suddenly against Baby’s shoulder and then said, in a way that told Baby he had already said it once before, “What are you listening to?”

Baby showed him.

“That’s cute,” Buddy said.

Darling said, “Kiss him,” and Baby wasn’t sure which one of them she was talking to, but he leaned forward and kissed Buddy, who tasted like him and Darling both.

*

The job the next morning went fine.

Later, he put the night’s playlist on repeat: memorized when to grab his cock and when to stroke his hand down his side and when to run his tongue over his lips.

*

“You should let us take you out sometime,” Buddy said.

Baby liked having the filter of music between them, like a curtain. He liked it more with them than with most people. “Do you do this thing a lot?”

“No,” Darling said, straight-faced. “You deflowered us, Baby. Then you don’t call, you don’t write. It breaks our hearts.” She rolled her eyes. “We’ve done it before, though Buddy’s usually a harder sell.”

“I do it to make her happy,” Buddy said. Baby could read his lips only when he spoke, not when he smiled, so he had no idea what to make of Buddy just then.

Darling brushed her thumb across his cheekbone. “Look at you. Like a deer in headlights.”

“I’m more comfortable behind headlights,” Baby said.

Buddy said, “Collisions can be enjoyable under the right circumstances.”

*

Then he didn’t see them for three months. The next time, Buddy had a tightly-trimmed beard and Darling was wearing green-tinted contact lenses that she said hurt her eyes. They took a bank and it ran so smoothly that Doc unwound afterwards and let them have champagne. They had another woman with them that night, a jittery blonde they were calling Sugar, and whenever she looked too long at Buddy, something rolled over in Baby’s stomach. She was pretty. She could be their pick for the night’s celebration—he had seen Darling kiss other women, openmouthed and lingering.

Doc slipped him his cut early. “Go have a good time.”

“Sorry?”

“I’m not naïve, Baby. If you want to be their _Cosmopolitan_ red hot sex tip or whatever the hell they’re calling it, go right ahead, only don’t kill Sugar for the privilege, she’s valuable. Go get a hotel room, hell, something classy, no magic fingers in the bed. Room service and fluffy white robes, if they even do that for three people.”

“It’s not what you think,” Baby said.

Doc’s smile was flat. “Isn’t it.”

They weren’t using him, Baby thought. They couldn’t use him if he didn’t mind being used. And he didn’t. Doc was proof of that.

He went to Darling. “Can we get out of here?”

“Baby, Baby, Baby,” she said, lacing her fingers behind his neck, “I thought you’d never ask. Buddy, didn’t you think he’d never ask?”

“I thought I’d die waiting,” Buddy said.

In the hotel room, they were both hungry for him in a way they had never been before. He wasn’t allowed the earbuds this time. Darling licked a line up his thigh and circled her tongue around the head of his cock. Buddy grazed Baby’s neck with his teeth.

The ringing in his ears felt like he was waiting for something to explode. He said, “I thought you said you didn’t like this.”

Buddy laughed. “Maybe you could corrupt a saint, Baby.”

“And Buddy’s no saint,” Darling said, looking up at them both.

Buddy put his mouth against Baby’s ear: intimately shocking, when he wasn’t used to anything there but sound. The actual words—“Let me fuck you”—were less convincing than the pressure, the warmth of his lips. “Let me fuck you while you fuck her.”

*

He bought Darling an emerald bracelet that he did not give her; bought Buddy a watch that he did not give him. He put them under the floorboard with the money.

Joe asked what the hell he thought he was doing.

 _Nothing_ , Baby said.

Joe’s movements were irritable. _You fall in love with the wrong people._

_I’m not in love._

Even with his hands, he was a bad liar.

*

Then they turned up outside of any meeting with Doc—turned up in a bar Baby had known they liked to go to. Maybe he was the one who was turning up, if you looked at it that way. It was near the Fourth of July, and someone had strung red and blue Christmas lights up behind the bar, threading them in between bottles of vodka and bourbon. The vodka shone blue. It threw light on Buddy’s cheek, on his jawbone. Blackbird. _Blackbird singing in the dead of night._

When Darling laughed, her teeth were red.

He should have let them see him—he knew they would have liked that—but like he’d said, he was more comfortable behind the headlights. He sent over drinks. It was the first time he’d ever done that and it made him feel like he was in an old movie.

They slid into the booth across from him. A single unit with him on the other side, but their feet against his under the table.

“I take it you didn’t come to find us for a job,” Buddy said.

Baby shook his head.

Darling slid her olive off its cocktail pick: a cymbal in Baby’s song clashed at the exact moment she closed her mouth down over it, like it was the sound of it getting eaten.

He waited to see what they would say. _You’re not part of our marriage. You don’t look us up. You don’t come where you think we’ll be. We tell you when and we tell you where. You’re a fling, don’t make yourself a problem._

“Well,” Darling said. “Aren’t you sweet.”

“He’s sweet,” Buddy said.

He shouldn’t have picked any songs with long fadeouts: he could hear the background noise of the bar too well. He said, “I’m not asking you for anything.”

Buddy shrugged. “Maybe you should.”

New song. New download: he didn’t know the words of this one yet.

Darling had the beautiful stillness of coiled muscles, a predator waiting to spring. There was no way for him to not be the deer.

He said, “Will you take me home with you?”

She didn’t take her eyes off him. “Buddy,” she said. “Settle Baby’s tab.”

“With pleasure.”

“We’ll give you directions,” Darling said. “But you’re going to drive us there. I like to watch you drive.”

“Who the hell wouldn’t?” Buddy said.

Baby wasn’t naïve enough to believe that the little bungalow they took him to was their real, permanent home—he wasn’t even naïve enough to believe they had one—and if he looked closely, he knew the photographs in the frames would be of some stranger’s family. The cupboard would have peanut butter even though Darling was allergic. But the bed smelled like them, and that was all he cared about.

No earbuds again. Nothing between them but the noise inside his head.

He got Buddy ready with his fingers and then slid into him, Buddy’s mouth on Darling’s pussy the whole time. There was a music to this.

That was the first night he actually slept with them. Not in the middle—that would have been too much to hope for—but curled up against Darling’s back. She had gotten the tattoo after all. He kissed it.

*

“Anybody else would have asked our names first thing,” Darling said once. They had driven to Jacksonville for the day and she was lying on a striped beach towel, a little smear of white sunscreen, not completely rubbed into her skin, on the slight soft curve of her belly near her navel. Buddy was getting them drinks, driven irresistibly to see Baby try his first piña colada.

Summertime beach sounds playlist. “The Boy from Ipanema,” the cover by Ella Fitzgerald.

He hadn’t asked their names because he was afraid they wouldn’t tell him. He hadn’t asked their names because that wasn’t what he’d wanted most.

“What’s _your_ name?” she said.

“Baby.”

“Oh, yeah? I look at your birth certificate and it says Baby?”

“Leave Baby alone,” Buddy said, coming back with the drinks. He sank the piña colada glass down into the sand next to Baby’s right hand. “Now you tell me that’s not delicious. But don’t play that fucking Rupert Holmes song, that ‘if you like piña coladas’ shit.”

He shook his head. “I don’t have that song.”

“Thank God,” Darling said. “Drink up. I want to get fucked up tonight. We’ll go to a club.”

Buddy licked a drop of sweat off her neck. “You spoiling for a fight, sweetheart?”

“Mm.” She moved closer to him, pulled him onto the towel with her, and they kissed. Baby drank his piña colada. He liked to watch them—the way their bodies moved, the thick shadow of Darling’s eyelashes when her eyes were closed, the way Buddy’s hand slipped unerringly—and invisibly, to anyone not so close—down her bikini bottom, his fingers moving against her clit. Buddy had good fingers.

“To a gay bar,” she said, rolling her hips. “I want to see people fight over you and Baby.”

“Baby’s like throwing chum in the water, and he’s already got two sharks to worry about.”

But they did go. Baby got another piña colada. He’d never been in a gay bar before but he liked that they didn’t seem to mind the headphones. His music clashed with their music and created an uneven, dissonant sound that made his heart pound a little harder. He thought of the tracks he had made of them, Buddy saying, “I thought I’d die waiting,” and Darling saying, “Allowed to look and allowed to touch.” Guys did look at him there, but not as much as they looked at Buddy.

Darling, though, only had eyes for one thing. “I don’t like him,” she said, her hand flat on the table but one finger outstretched, unerringly pointed at a man down the length of the bar, a man in a black silk shirt. “You see the way he’s looking.”

“I don’t think here’s the place where you have to worry about people looking at you funny,” Buddy said.

“That’s so narrow-minded. He could be like you and Baby, he could be bi.”

“True. Maybe you draw every bi guy within a hundred mile radius.”

Buddy had said he didn’t like guys generally, only did it for Darling, but Baby was the exception to that. He wondered now if Buddy had been lying or if he had just changed his mind.

“And anyway,” Darling said, her voice so low somehow that it crept underneath the music, some secret just for the three of them, “I didn’t mean me, asshole. I meant I don’t like the way he’s looking at Baby. Do you like the way he’s looking at you, Baby?”

Baby had barely noticed him. “I don’t mind.”

“You don’t mind? You’re out with us, you think it’s okay for him to look at you like that?”

“You looked at me like that,” Baby said.

“You were alone when we met you,” Buddy said.

Darling nodded. “And anyway, you’re ours.” She ran one finger around the whole shape of his hand, dipping in between his fingers and then coming back to pause where there would have been a ring. “Aren’t you?”

He wasn’t sure she was really asking. He said yes, the music too loud for him to hear himself.

“So if you’re ours, he shouldn’t be looking at you like that.” She looked over at Buddy. “You want someone looking funny at Baby, honey?”

Buddy’s smile just then was hard to look at. “No, I don’t.”

*

Baby woke up in the middle of the night to Buddy in the bathroom of their hotel room, water thundering down into the sink. Their suitcase was flipped open on the floor, the clothes mussed. He lifted Darling’s arm off him and crossed the room until he could see Buddy reflected in the bathroom mirror, could see Buddy see him.

Buddy turned off the tap. “Good, you’re up. We should probably leave soon. I’ll just need her nail-file, I think, that’ll take care of the rest of this.”

“It’s three in the morning,” Baby said.

“You think I don’t know what time it is? We’ll want to make it back to Atlanta in time for breakfast. No sense taking unnecessary chances.”

“Chances?”

Buddy sighed. “Come over here.”

Baby came over and looked in the sink, where there was still some red down in the soapsuds, still some red on the dwindled shard of ivory hotel soap. And, when he looked even closer than that, still some red underneath Buddy’s fingernails.

“Don’t panic,” Buddy said. He raised Baby’s chin and kissed him. He tasted like toothpaste—Baby had watched him brush his teeth standing right here just a few hours ago. “If you want, you can pretend you never woke up. If you want to dive into, you know, the psychology of things, obviously it was more for me and for her than it was for you.”

He felt like he couldn’t catch up and it was such a disorienting feeling that he reached out and grabbed the edge of the sink to hold himself up. “The guy from the bar?”

“I’m not going to make a habit of it,” Buddy said. “But hey, we weren’t at home.”

Darling’s voice behind them, sudden and still thick with sleep: “You took care of it?”

“I took care of it,” Buddy said. “You’ll see it on the news tomorrow.”

“We can record it,” she said, stretching and yawning. “I’ll start packing.”

Baby just stood there, seeing the headlights. It felt like he stood there for a long time.


End file.
